ARTS

Music

Down with dodecaphony

Herbert Lomas urges us to trust our ears and get rid of Schoenberg

Only you must not tell people that that they will like my pictures. You must make them realise that they cannot but like my pictures, because they have been praised by authorities on painting; and above all that it is much more interesting to have one's portrait done by or to own a painting by a musician of my reputation than by some mere practitioner of painting whose name will be forgotten in 20 years, whereas even now my name belongs to the history of music .. . The sitter knows who is painting him: he must also realise that he understands nothing about such things, but that the portrait has artistic value, or, to say the least of it, historical value.

Arnold Schoenberg, letter to Emil Hertzka, managing director of Universal Edition music publishers, Vienna, 7 March 1910

his is a long epigraph, but it is impor- tant because it shows Schoenberg the self- publicist at work, and helps to explain his status. This is the PR that many of his pro- moters have subsequently practised emphasising, not the expert's legitimate right to introduce us to new work, but his duty to bully us out of our own judgment. Freedom includes freedom to decide whether the expert is a help or not. It is of course more dignified to prefer our native scepticism and follow our own noses — or in this case eyes and ears — but also essen- tial to the vitality of the mind; and the best art promotes that vitality. Great artists are certainly experts, and educators and libera- tors as well: the reverse of authoritarian blanket-bombers of the mind. Of course, we cannot deny Schoenberg's ability — not only as a musician but as a teacher. That is part of the problem. If he were not a high- grade expert he would have gone away long .ago. But I suggest that the time has come for us to trust our own ears.

Many open-minded people, willing to experiment, were told in their youth that all they had to do with Schoenberg was continue listening: then, as with Wagner, they would begin to 'hear'. Well, we did begin to hear Schoenberg — all too well, and too often: we became overfamiliar with that repetitive leaping, jigging, pausing, banging and percussive tinkling, perhaps accompanied by the starts and shrieks of some soprano risking her throat. The shrapnel of notes was embedded in the memory, and repeated in by the parroting of a perch of imitators. But we did not like what we heard — and neither did any one else, apart from Pierre Boulez, Elizabeth Lutyens, Humphrey Searle, some powerful people at the BBC and various other inter- ests.

Yet Schoenberg is still being thrust on us, sneaked into popular " programmes, plugged on Radio 3, given whole weeks at the Festival Hall; and 'The Second Vien- nese School' has been made compulsory on one A-level board's syllabus. So many com- posers are allowed to die a natural death. How did Schoenberg succeed in making himself immortal? For the educated music public and most of our finest musicians including soloists like Campoli, Schwarz- kopf and Tortellier — have systematically and often explicitly rejected him. It is almost an invitation to a conspiracy theory about some oligarchy of strategically placed musical politicians.

It will be difficult to remove him. The trouble is that ordinary music-lovers are easily intimidated by musical technicalities and what they suppose to be the complica- tion of Schoenberg's method. Their ears and their common sense are certainly to be

trusted. It is not necessary to be a gram- marian to know when one is listening to gobbledegook; and, similarly, we know intuitively what is meaningless in music, even if we would not feel able to give a professional formulation to our response. Nevertheless, it is necessary for the ordi- nary music-lover to be given the tool of a simple account of how the system works, and this is what I propose to do.

For in fact the dodecaphonic method is extraordinarily simple: once a practitioner has got the hang of it, composing is no more difficult than organising a game of clumps. Perhaps that is why those threat- ened with sterility find it a saving tech- nique. All a composer needs to do is apply the method. Schoenberg is like a man who says it is too late in the century to play rugby on a rectangular pitch. Progress requires a Schoenberg, and no one else is willing to be he: so next week he'll arrange a game on a triangular pitch, the week after on a pentagonal, then on a hexagonal one, a rhombus, and so on. At first the pro- cess has the charm of novelty, but soon the players realise they're spending each week learning a new set of rules and never enjoy- ing a game.

Such an analogy is of course imprecise. It is instructive to contrast language and music. Language is a system of conven- tions, yes. That is precisely why we under- stand each other. If there were no commonly accepted conventions we would be in gabble-gabble land. The arbitrary arrangements of vowels and consonants the noise 'cat' could represent 'dog' provid- ed we agreed that it did — work because they are accepted. Moreover, the function of language is not arbitrary: there is an ani- mal out there with teeth, and that animal enters our imaginations through this arbi- trary sign. Grammatical relations point to events outside language: subject and object, for instance. The arbitrary noises and written signs for 'I' and 'me' indicate the difference between smacking and get- ting smacked, hunting and being hunted.

But the musical process is unique and must be observed in its own terms. For sim- ple comprehension and advanced commu- nication music too needs conventions; yet the rules of music are not arbitrary conven- tions, as the rules of language partially are. And musical notes do not represent any- thing, as words do. They are themselves; and everything that develops from .them the simplest rhythm or melody, the most complicated symphony — develops out of their relationship to each other.

These relationships, far from being arbi- trary, are based on mathematical relation- ships observed by Pythagoras in about 550 BC. When a string is plucked, it not only vibrates along its whole length, creating a note or 'tone': it also vibrates in shorter lengths simultaneously. These shorter lengths are mathematical intervals: half- length, two-thirds-length, three-quarter- length, and so on. The smaller vibrating lengths create the 'overtones', which are heard as an enrichment of the major tone. Moreover, these precisely measurable intervals sound the notes of the tonal scales.

Experimenting with harp strings, Pyth- agoras found that a division at the half raised the pitch an octave. This was there- fore the most important interval in music. A division by two-thirds raised the pitch a perfect fifth. This was therefore the second most important relationship; and, of course, in a tonal composition, the fifth is the top note of the basic or 'tonic' arrange- ment of three notes called a triad. It is also the bottom note of the 'dominant', the chord most frequently switched to in a piece of music. A division at three-quarters raised the pitch by a perfect fourth: this is the bottom note of the next most important triad, or chord, in a composition, the sub- dominant. Anyone who can strum knows that most popular songs can be played with these three chords. Once the fourth and fifth had been found, Pythagoras noted the interval between them: what we call a `tone'. This was then accepted as a stan- dard, and from this 'note' he went on to calculate the mathematical distances of the other notes in a scale: an additional four tones and two semitones in the space between two octaves.

In this case we are dealing with 'nature', therefore, and not something arbitrary. When we strike a piano note, nature accommodates it to our ear by sounding off mathematically the appropriate tones and semitones. Tonality is not something arbi- trary, a mere convention to be discarded at will, but a gift of things as they are.

About 80 years ago Schoenberg decided to smash all this. Why? Theoretically because the developments in music, such as Wagner's chromaticism, had allegedly made this a logical next step — as though an art were, like science, something that must always be technically on the march. More deeply, I suspect, Schoenberg had realised the limitations of his musical imag- ination. He called an American composer `a latter-day Bruckner'. Had Schoenberg realised he himself was a second-rate Mahler? — an obvious implication, if one listens to early works such as the winsome Verkhirte Nacht (1899) or the enormously scored choral-orchestral Gurrelieder (1900- 13), which sounds like some totalitarian rally. Was he never going to look like any- thing else, unless he did something drastic?

So in 1908, with 'Fifteen Poems' from Stefan George's Buch der Hangenden Garten, he excluded the traditional use of keys. He decided to use not the eight notes of the tonal scales but all the other sharps

and flats as well — and to give all the notes an equal status. This was the beginning of the 12-note scale and the system that devel- oped from it. Now there would be no tonic, dominant, subdominant, leading note and so on. He had decided to throw over the mathematically based grammar of music.

This left him without the grammatical resources available in composition up till then. So how would he proceed to com- pose? He would start from an arbitrary arrangement of all 12 notes between two octaves: just all 12 notes in some arbitrary order. No matter that this arrangement had no symmetries or repetitions that would make it sound 'meaningful' to the ear. The starting point of each composition would be this 'theme', or formula, consisting of all 12 notes occurring once, and once only, in an arbitrary order decided on by the com- poser in advance.

A theme of 12 notes, all of them differ- ent, in random order: the count of notes is somewhat less than in, say, the opening theme of Mozart's piano sonata in A (K.331), which has 19 notes in four bars. But in the Mozart the notes are not all dif- ferent, and we have repetition and varia- tion, symmetry and contrast: the five notes in bar one are repeated in the same order, in a lower register, in bar two; the other two bars are arranged to 'answer' the first two and bring the passage to a point of semi-rest; the theme passes through the grammatical alternations of dominant, sub- dominant and dominant in a seductive way that a person who does not even know these terms can recognise; and then the four bars are repeated with a slight varia- tion, ending on the tonic, that is the A major chord with which the piece started. No one has been known to get tired of this tune, even though he can almost memorise it at once and thus follow the games Mozart will play with it immediately, A typical dodecaphonic formula would take a long time to memorise and would still give no pleasure because there are no rhythmic features in it: that is, there is none of the principle of repetition with variation, similitude in dissimilitude, which is how rhythm can be defined.

Now Schoenberg proceeds to 'develop' his piece out of this original formula: he can play it as first formulated; he can play it backwards; he can turn it upside down; he can play the upside-down version back- wards. Simple, isn't it? But what a row!

And there is a problem about playing a formula backwards: even a simple, beauti-

ful and well-known tune played backwards is unrecognisable. This is a great deal truer of a tone row. So the device of retrograde motion — playing backwards — is fruitless; and, in practice, it needs a patient ear even to register the two other ploys — the straightforward order and the inverted order. And these are the only ones that can register. This inhuman and impractical for- mula is allowed to be used at any pitch of the 12 notes. Four times 12 is 48: thus there are 48 forms of the 12-note tone row available for use in the piece.

For 'harmony' Schoenberg uses the same 12 notes — only this time up and down on the sheet, instead of horizontally. They can occur as 'chords', that is, all 12 complete; or possibly six in one chord and the next six in another; or even in threes; but they must always follow in the same order until the series is completed and can begin again.

Thus, though the equal status of all 12 notes can look 'democratic', there is noth-

ing democratic about the process at all. It

follows a rigid formula, organised by a drastic master-plan, worked out in the wits and making no concession to the imagina- tion's longing for delight. The composer does not have to listen to his intuition or his heart or his imagination or trial-and- error to know what to do next: it is all laid down like the blueprint of a do-it-yourself clock.

Nevertheless, where rhythm is con- cerned, there is perfect freedom. But this, in practice, if adhered to, means there is no rhythm to speak of. Perfect repetition is boredom. Perfect freedom is chaos.

Rhythm exists at points on a spectrum between pure repetition and pure varia- tion. In dodecaphonic music rhythm can be

varied at, any moment according to the composer's whim: hence those weird jerks and jumps.

Also, there is complete freedom about the pitch — another escape from the excru- ciating rigour of the method: any note of the series can appear in any octave. How- ever, since there are no keys, modulation upwards and downwards is impossible. There is nothing to do but jump. Hence those weird abrupt upward and downward leaps and shrieks.

There are no problems in composing this scheme: the problems arise in listening to it. With the disappearance of tonic, dominant, and the rest, there can be no cadences. There is no modulation — that charming staple of great music, the seduc- tive or startling change from one key to another. The contrast of concord and dis- cord is lost: all is discord. Perhaps we should change the pronunciation of 'row' in lone-row music'.

Am I saying something new? No I am not. What I have to say has been common knowledge among musicians for decades.

Why, then, has this completely improbable invention been allowed to be so influential — to become, in fact, one of the major causes of breakdown between the contem- porary composer and the public? That would be the subject of a very interesting sociological enquiry, and someone should do it.

Herbert Lomas's latest book is Contempo- rary Finnish Poetry (Bloodaxe Books).